1. Field of the Invention:
The invention relates to a toy wheel in which a wheel is propelled along the ground or other surface by a hand-held control stick.
2. Description of the Prior Art:
The prior art discloses numerous forms of toy wheel devices. U.S. Pat. No. 3,715,834, for example, discloses one in which the wheel has a pair of sharply pointed flanges which fit extremely loosely within a pair of spaced grooves carried by the control stick. In U.S. Pat. No. 2,970,403, the wheel engages a rotatably mounted roller carried by the control stick and the stick has a pair of spaced prongs which must be separated in order to disconnect the wheel from the stick. U.S. Pat. No. 3,785,652 discloses a device in which the stick is rotatably connected to a pair of spaced guide wheels which engage the ground simultaneously with the wheel portion of the toy.
The prior art devices have in common the fact that they do not provide sufficient simply executed control of the wheel to permit it to be moved through a variety of angular positions and directions without the operator losing control of the wheel. Prior devices are also in many cases unnecessarily complicated in their structure, having various numbers of moving parts.
Previous devices of this type have been made in such a manner that the user quickly lost interest in the toy because of its lack of versatility in performance characteristics. Prior devices did not allow a substantial degree of sideward tipping of the wheel, nor did they allow very abrupt directional changes at high speeds. They also did not provide the capability of shuttling the wheel back and forth between two control sticks without the wheel falling sideways to the ground.